Whigs and Pisstles
Feeling wiped. Mentally, emotionally. Not certain why, really. I just stepped into my past. Or did I step on it. What did I just step in? The ambivalence began to be mutual, but so did the interest. That is where the conversation intrudes.
I am at a midtown chain bar called the Pig & Whistle, or as I think of it, the Whig and Pisstle. I have no bad feelings toward the place, but introducing an extinct political party before the sound of pisstles amuses me.
I just spent a couple of hours with the sister of Keri, Keri who died 11 years ago. It was interesting to hear new things about that time, and to tell of things I knew. I never knew Keri was on a trip around America at the time. I knew she died in Florida but I didn’t know the lead-up to that. She *moved* to Florida? That doesn’t sound right, but there is no way to know what motivated her trip there, or her last grand tour. And who knew she was taking steroids all those years, and that it changed the shape of her face? She knew, but none other of us knew. She herself may not have known she was dying, or that her time was short.
Tantalizing talk of boxes in Ocean City, boxes full of Keri’s pictures, drawers full of floppy disks, that tantalizing sensation gradually overcome by aforementioned ambivalence and my meek suggestion that we do something with it. At the end she told me something that made all the sense in the world. Keri insisted her subjects not smile. So our picture together has us not smiling. Not frowning, but not smiling. It’s a funny shot, I think.
I don’t know. I don’t know. Nobody knows but that her memory survives in a hungry way. How interesting she would be today had our friendship lasted these 15 years. She died, though, and partly because of that a lot of bullshit lingers, stillborn pettiness. Tears nearly flowed but not quite. My eyes are pretty blurry right now, though, here with the midtown office workers at the Whig & Pisstle.
You know, I just looked around this place and asked myself, where the fuck am I?
